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My Baby is Having a Baby

Showers of Blessing

My baby is having a baby. That incredible reality means that soon I will be a grandmother. Hardly can my heart conceive it. My life has moved so quickly from the days when with no care crossed my mind, when I was a little girl playing in my own grandmother’s yard, climbing the shrub turned tree behind her house, and listening to the whistle of the canner in the kitchen as she put away our food for the year. I remember long hot summers with fans blowing from windows in nearly every room in her house. At my Grandma’s I was waiting for summer to end so life could begin, when the yellow school bus would roll to its first stop at her house to collect me and my sister so we could get out of the country to school where life happened. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I had been thinking upside-down. Life was in the country, in the front yard playing under towering sycamore trees.

At Memaw’s, I remember tiny pricks from the little needles that measured the hems of the dresses she sewed for my sister and me. Two identical outfits, later in different colors that we chose, mine being yellow and my sister’s purple. Every afternoon at Memaw’s there was something sweet to eat. A pie or a cake sat on the stand in the kitchen, or there was the gallon bucket of vanilla ice cream in the freezer to give us that afternoon pick-me-up. The ice cream was always served on a cone. There was also a candy bowl with jelly orange slices faintly coated in fine sugar, butterscotch candies, and a jumble of hard candy pieces stuck together awaiting our prying hands.

Forty years later, the winter is the wait rather than the summer. This summer the long days that seemed so long when I was six passed quickly at forty-six. Now suddenly, I am planning for Christmas, and for a baby, Naomi, the little one that Annie carries in her womb. A child being woven by God and already loved by Him and her Momma and Daddy and by all that love them, especially those who remember as if it were yesterday the days Annie and Caleb were born.

I prayed for Annie’s husband so many whispered dreams for as she grew into a woman. I still pray for her and for him. I pray for their life together as they learn to live with the one who will change everything. I know because I know how graced I was by God when he sent Andrea Leigh to us when we could not afford her, when her Daddy was still in throws of school and would be for her first years. She arrived with my Grandma’s deep dimples and she proceeded to overwhelm me with colic for six months. Then she sat in a high chair at six months and begged for bites of rice at the Chinese restaurant. Seems like it all happened last week.

Now Annie waits as I did, through the weeks of the Christmas season for the life inside her to make her grand entrance into the world. The next generation in two families will begin with one little girl. Before we know her, God knows her, is forming her, has had plans for her from the beginning of the world. May Naomi take her place in the plan of God and find that those who came before her were faithful. No doubt the One who made her is Faithful. How grateful I am for the amazing story He is writing, woven together in the lives of His children, Naomi, already taking her place in the next chapter.

"We love because He first loved us." (I John 4:19 NIV)

(Thoughts on the coming of my first grandchild—an assignment from my neice Ashley.)